Tangentially related, but still interesting: most people think hard drives have a bathtub curve when failure rate is plotted against time. Turns out this isn't true.
Schroeder and Gibson: "Contrary to common and proposed models, hard drive failure rates don’t enter steady state after the first year of operation. Instead failure rates seem to steadily increase over time."
Schroeder and Gibson: "Contrary to common and proposed models, hard drive failure rates don’t enter steady state after the first year of operation. Instead failure rates seem to steadily increase over time."
http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/Failure/CMU-PDL-06-111.pdf